Month: August 2010

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters, a blog devoted to helping readers dive into the ocean of truth and swim for all its worth! Our subject of discussion the past few months has been the doctrine of God. Our guide for this study has been the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, which can be read for free at newadvent.org. Our topic tonight is the divine beatitude and we’ll be asking if God is the beatitude of each of the blessed.

Aquinas says no, which could be seen as a surprise, but there is a reason for this. Aquinas is not one who wants to limit God, but he wants to be sure that we are being accurate with our philosophical terminology. Aquinas has said earlier that the joy of the blessed is in the beatific vision where they see God as He is.

However, there are degrees of joy, and there are some Christians, myself included, who believe this is what is meant by our rewards. We will have a great capacity to enjoy God based on how we responded to Him in this life. Now that doesn’t mean there will be unhappy people in Heaven. All will be happy, but some will have more to be happy with.

Of course, the object of this vision is always God and so the object of joy for the blessed will be God. Aquinas does not deny this. However, the joy comes in knowing God and knowing is an act of the intellect. Thus, the joy is found in the action of knowing the one who we are with.

Marriage provides an example of this that we can understand. The lovers enjoy the sight of one another, but they both know that the best realization of their joy will come in the physical act of intercourse with one another. The object of their love has not changed from dating to marriage, but the way that they are able to express that love and know the other person has increased (It is interesting in this light that in biblical terminology, to have intercourse with someone is to know them).

For all of us, we should be humbled at this. While I do say the knowing is an act of the intellect, this does not mean its reserved best for the solely intellectual types. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere of how you can be an apologist in a church service watching some lady in the pew and your pride is tempted to think of how much more you know about doctrines and church history and evidences then that person does, but then you get reminded that when it comes to personal holiness, you’re not worthy to untie her shoes.

Our goal then should be that no matter our position, what we have, we give to God. If you have a strong intellect, give that to God. If you have a great singing voice, give that to God. If you have strength of the body, give it to God. Think of the parable of the talents and use whatever it is you have to the glory of God.

We shall conclude this topic tomorrow.

Hello readers and welcome back to Deeper Waters, the blog that seeks to explore ever deeper the ocean of truth! Our topic recently has been the doctrine of God, the highest thought in Christianity, but then, the highest thought period. How you answer the God question will determine how you answer every other question. Our guide for this journey has been the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, which can be read for free at newadvent.org. We’re on the topic of the beatitude of God now and our question tonight is if God is called blessed according to His intellect.

By speaking of blessed, we are referring to happiness. We do not take much time today to think about the happiness of God. Yesterday, I stated that happiness is not necessarily a feeling. God does not have passions in the sense that we do. He does have happiness, but it is not a feeling so much as it is an awareness. He has incredible happiness that is not an emotional state, for an emotion is generally a response to something else and God does not “respond” in time as we do.

However, he is happy. Why? For Aquinas, the highest joys can be found in the intellectual life and in a sense, this is so. After all, we do not believe that we have an advantage over God by our being material in that we can partake of greater joys than He can. God’s greatest joy is Himself. He does not need to be material in order to enjoy Himself.

Now we can say being material allows us to enjoy great joys of the body like food, drink, athletic activity, sex, etc. There is nothing wrong with any of these pleasures, but each of these pleasures are also pointers beyond themselves. Jesus used food to speak of the sustenance that only he provides and Paul described man and woman being one as a mystery and something not fully understood until Christ came along and we saw Christ and the church.

The intellect is that by which we understand something. It is a joy to think about that which makes us happy. Too often, we tend to do the opposite and sadly when we think about God, it often doesn’t make us happy. Our fallenness should be clear to anyone who is a Christian in that we do not think about what we ought and that even great truths we see in Scripture often do not make us happy.

But for God, He does understand and know Himself and so He is happy in Himself. It is when we see Him that we will be happy truly as well. All happiness we have here is meant to be a foretaste to the greater happiness that is awaiting us. The problem we usually have with these happinesses are that we take them to be the final. They are really the mirrors that are reflecting a greater happiness that awaits us.

Which brings us to an interesting truth. God does want us to be happy, but He knows that that happiness we seek ultimately lies only in Himself. We will never be truly happy until we know God as He is. Since that is where our ultimate happiness lies, does it not make sense to seek that happiness now?

We shall continue tomorrow.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Deeper Waters, a Christian blog seeking to dive into the ocean of truth! We’ve been spending time looking at the doctrine of God and right now, we’re at the final section of our study and that is the blessedness of God. Our guide for this has been the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, which can be read for free at newadvent.org. I hope readers will continue studying the thought of Thomas Aquinas even after this portion of our study is done. Tonight, we will begin this topic by looking at the question of if God is indeed blessed.

Happiness. What is it? What does it mean? In our world, there is much confusion over the topic of happiness. Modern minds tend to understand happiness to be a feeling and having what one desires. Now there is some truth to that, although I would not say that happiness is a feeling but it is what produces a feeling that we call happiness. (I would also say the feeling of love is more that which is produced by the action of love)

The problem however is that we do not know what we ought to desire and if we look for something else to be the ultimate and receive that something else and it does not satisfy, we will be depressed. This does not mean that we cannot look to other things to bring about happiness to some degree. They just cannot bring us happiness.

For instance, as it stands, in the realm of things that aren’t specifically Christian, I can celebrate now the love of a very good woman, the friendship that I have with several people, and to get to think about the things that matter most. For the Christian side, I have the forgiveness of God, that He has blessed me with being able to serve Him, and that I have a great church fellowship. (Although I am still in major need of employment. We would still be very appreciative of any donations made)

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your life. Over here, the wife and I watch DVDs and enjoy video games together. Right now, she just got done asking me what the blog was about and we have some good discussion on these kinds of topics. Of course, she also makes sure I keep up with schoolwork. I can enjoy movies with friends and this evening will be enjoying gaming with friends, going to an ice cream parlor as I regularly do, and then going bowling. There is nothing wrong with enjoying pleasures in life provided we don’t make them everything.

What is happiness then really? Happiness is realizing your place in the universe and conforming yourself to it. Too often, we try to conform the universe to our desires. We should find the way reality is and not try to adapt it to us, but rather try to adapt ourselves to it. The problem is not our having desire, but our having improper desire. We desire too much the things that won’t satisfy, and we desire too little the one that does satisfy, namely God. For Aquinas, this happiness would not be reached apart from the beatific vision, that is, the seeing of God.

Is God happy then? Yes. He accepts reality as it is and accepts the reality that He is in fact God and is happy with that state. Hence, while there is much that is not good, that cannot detract Him from the overall good, which is Himself. We are promised that we will have similar happiness when we see Him.

God is blessed indeed, and by his grace, so shall we be.

We shall continue tomorrow.

Hello everyone and welcome to Deeper Waters, a blog dedicated to diving into the truth of Christianity! We’re right now going through the doctrine of God in Christian thought. The guide that we are using for this fascinating study is the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, a work that can be read for free at newadvent.org. Tonight, we’re going to wrap up our look at the doctrine of the power of God and ask if God can do better than he does.

A lot of readers I think will be surprised and say “Of course he can’t! He’s God!” However, if you say that, Aquinas is in disagreement with you. Now there are some ways he does agree he can’t do better. For instance, if you say better refers to God’s activity rather than to what was created, then no, God could not have created in a better way. If you mean that the universe could be better than it is, then yes, Aquinas agrees with that.

There are exceptions. Four cannot be a greater number than it is. If it had something added to it, it would not be four. The reason is that in this case, it would change the substance. A man turned into an angel would no longer be a man as an example. (Hence, when people die, they do not become angels.)

There is an old joke that the optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist is afraid that this is correct. This was the position of Leibniz as well. When the humanist Voltaire wrote his Candide, he wrote it to mock the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds.

God has ways he could improve this world. For instance, do you think that humanity is good? If so, then God could have just added one more human. Space problems? Okay. Change the order of the universe and make everything correspond somehow. Still, you could add more. The same could be said of angels. If angels are good, then creating more of them would make things better.

Substances however do not become better by having more of them. Substances are good by virtue of what they are. We could always celebrate having more, but that won’t make them better by quality. It will simply be that we have more of a quantity of things that are better by quality.

When it comes to this with the problem of evil, a great mistake many atheists make is that they assume the world has to be perfect in every way for God to have created it. The mistake the Christian makes is that he gives in to this paradigm and just says “It will be better in Heaven.” Now no doubt it will be, but it is up to the one who is pushing the problem of evil to show that this was wrong on God’s part and that there is a necessary contradiction between a good God and the existence of evil in the world. So far, this has yet to be done.

The big question to ask for us now however is not what God could do. We should ask what are we going to do with what God has done. There is no doubt that we can do better and our God certainly deserves the best from us.

We shall start a new subject tomorrow.

Hello readers and welcome back to Deeper Waters, a blog dedicated to diving into the ocean of truth! Tonight, we’re studying the doctrine of God in Christian thought. We’ve been using the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which can be read for free at newadvent.org, as our guide for this study. Right now, we’re studying the topic of the power of God and the question we’re asking tonight is “Can God Do What He Does Not?”

This might seem like a difficult question at first in the sense of wondering what exactly is being asked. The idea is whether or not God is forced to do what he does. Does he have to do one thing and if something happens, then that is the only thing that could happen? Is everything predetermined in the sense that even God is predetermined?

Aquinas says no and points to Matthew 26:53 as his authority with the reminder that Jesus said the Father could send down twelve legion of angels. We know from Scripture that that didn’t happen. Keep that in mind would-be philosophers. The greatest Christian philosophers used Scripture. (As one of my philosophy professors said in our class one day before reading Scripture, “This is a Bible.”) A good Christian philosopher will know Scripture well.

It has been said when we looked at the will of God that God does not act from necessity. The only thing that He wills of necessity is Himself. That means everything else that he wills he wills contingently. He did not have to create, but he chose to create.

Aquinas tells us to look at what the purpose of creation is. Creation is for the glory of God. All things were created that God might have glory and so the divine wisdom acts through the creation in order to bring glory to God. It should be obvious that the end for which creation was made is greater than creation itself.

Because of this, the creation does not restrict God. He can do whatever He wants in it that will bring about glory for Him. God could have acted in any number of ways a number of times. This is especially so if you have beings that have free-will roaming around creation who act out of their own freedom, though acting in a way that is foreknown to God.

But is there any restriction on the way God acts? Yes. God acts according to his nature. God cannot lie for instance. God cannot violate the laws of logic either. God will always act in a way that is wise and just. The point is that there are many different things God is capable of doing in a situation that are wise and just.

For us, we should learn then to trust God. Because God does not act the way that we want Him to, it is easy to think He acted in the way He ought not. God has a number of options on how He can perform and whichever way He chooses, we should believe that He is working all things to our good (if we are Christians) and more importantly, his glory.

We shall continue tomorrow.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters, a place where we dive into the ocean of truth! We’re studying the doctrine of God right now in Christian thought. Our guide for this has been the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, a work that can be read for free at newadvent.org. Tonight, we’re going to be looking more at the topic of the power of God and asking if this power of God is capable of changing the past.

Why shouldn’t God be able to change the past? It would seem as if this would be something simple. My wife and I spent the evening watching a favorite program together. Maybe he could make it so that instead, we played a game on the Wii together.

However, Aquinas says that this is not the case. To say of Socrates that he sat and then say of him that he did not sit is to take what is true and then to make it false. It is asking God to make what is true to be false. He also has the belief of Aristotle behind him on that one. Aquinas gives this quote from Book VI of the Ethics that can be found in section 2.

For this alone is lacking even to God,
To make undone things thathave once been done.)

Quite revealing is the whole section before that:

The origin of action-its efficient, not its final cause-is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end. This is why choice cannot exist either without reason and intellect or without a moral state; for good action and its opposite cannot exist without a combination of intellect and character. Intellect itself, however, moves nothing, but only the intellect which aims at an end and is practical; for this rules the productive intellect, as well, since every one who makes makes for an end, and that which is made is not an end in the unqualified sense (but only an end in a particular relation, and the end of a particular operation)-only that which is done is that; for good action is an end, and desire aims at this. Hence choice is either desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire, and such an origin of action is a man. (It is to be noted that nothing that is past is an object of choice, e.g. no one chooses to have sacked Troy; for no one deliberates about the past, but about what is future and capable of being otherwise, while what is past is not capable of not having taken place; hence Agathon is right in saying

What this means is that once something is done, it is not undone. Indeed, were God to ever change the past, we would not know that it had been changed. How could we? If God made it so that my wife and I played the Wii together, then it would be in my memory that we did that. If I asserted otherwise, would I be speaking truthfully or a lie? We could have indeed watched a program, but then it would be that it was changed so that we played the Wii together.

If I say we played the Wii together, did we really do it, or did God change our choices for us? Will I have a memory of us doing that, or will I remember what I know we freely chose to do, namely watching a program together on DVD? The complexities that arise from such an issue are staggering.

It is my conclusion that God does not and cannot change the past for he does not change either what he is eternally doing. The first place ultimately to look for the answer is again, not in the world that we see around us, but in the very nature of God himself.

We shall continue tomorrow.

Hello readers and welcome back to Deeper Waters, a place where we seek to always dive into the ocean of truth! Right now, we’re talking about the doctrine of God and we’re going through it little by little. It’s a huge topic after all! Fortunately, we have a great guide on our journey. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century monk, is our guide, and his Summa Theologica, which can be read for free at newadvent.org, is our text. Tonight, we’re on the topic of the power of God. We’re asking the question “Is God omnipotent?”

Many Christians have been stopped in their tracks sadly by this question: “Can God make a rock so big he can’t lift it?” My personal favorite answer to this question was the one given by Dr. Gary Habermas when I heard him bring it up at a talk one time. The answer is as follows:

“No.”

Some Christians fear that we have abandoned omnipotence at this point. In reality, we haven’t. Why? Aquinas tells us. Aquinas points out that contradictions are impossible and power is only capable of doing all that it is possible to do. To make something like a square circle is nonsense. If it is square, it is not a circle. If it is a circle, it is not a square. C.S. Lewis once said that nonsense doesn’t cease to be nonsense just because you add the words “God can” before it.

The big rock question is just such a question. For one thing, a rock like that would to be infinite, but rocks are finite by nature since an infinite quantity does not exist. If it was measurable in some way, it could not be infinite. In other words, the questioner wants a rock that is finite and infinite.

Most essentially however, the answer is no because God can handle whatever he creates and to ask if he can create something that he can’t handle is nonsense. It means that there is a weakness on the part of God and weakness is not a sign of omnipotence but a sign of impotence. In fact, it is because God is omnipotent that he cannot do what the questioner asks if he can do.

This is also why it is impossible for God to sin or to lie or do any number of things. He cannot do these things because these are signs of imperfection and God does not have imperfection. Of course, we realize there are some differences when we get to the incarnation as Christ is fully God and fully human and in his humanity, he does take on the limitations of humanity, such as being able to be subject to death. In his deity however, he never is.

Unfortunately, Christians have for too long defended a view of omnipotence that is simply nonsense. There are a number of things that God cannot do and these are things he cannot do not because he is impotent, but because he is omnipotent. While there are still questions in this area, such as how the medievals would debate if God could swim, to which I’d say it’s nonsense to ask if an immaterial being can in immateriality do a material action, let us make sure we are not spending our time defending a view of omnipotence that is not biblical or historical.

We shall continue tomorrow.

Hello everyone, and welcome back once more to Deeper Waters, where we plunge into the ocean of truth! We’re going through the doctrine of God right now in Christian thought and the text that is our guide is the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, a work that can be read for free, which is always a great price, at newadvent.org. Right now, we’re discussing God’s power and tonight, we’re going to ask if the power of God is infinite.

It had been said that everything that is infinite is imperfect. However, the power of God is not imperfect. If that is the case, then the power of God cannot be infinite because if it was, it would be imperfect. Therefore, the power of God must not be infinite.

While this is attributed in thought to Aristotle, the section being referred to is about an infinite body. This could be a problem for groups like the Mormons who have a deity that is necessarily bodily, but it is not a problem for orthodox Christians as we do not have a God who is material by nature. The reason that the infinite body would be a problem is that the infinity would refer to quantity and not quality. We do not mean when we say that God has infinite power that you keep building up more and more power and then you reach the point of infinite power. An infinite cannot be transversed. It means that God has all the ability of power and that he can do what power can do.

Isn’t a power known by its effect? After all, if a power is at work and the effect that fits that power does not come about, then that is power in vain and there is nothing in God that is in vain. However, if the cause of an effect was infinite, then the effect would need to be infinite, and this is impossible. Nothing can be infinite besides God.

However, this is the case of a univocal agent. God is not one of those as he does not belong to a genus or a species, as was shown when we went over divine simplicity. His effect will always be less than his power. However, this does not mean that his power is in vain. Power that is in vain is power that does not reach the end that it desires. God always gets the end that He desires for He is His own end.

Again, the reason why God’s power is infinite is the doctrine that Aquinas treats first, the simplicity of God. God does not have part of anything but He is what He has. He is His power. He has power to perfection and so because of that, we can know that the power of God is infinite.

What does this mean for us? If we know this, we ought to live like it is so. We can read about Moses asking God how it could be that He could provide meat for all the Israelites and reading the text it is so easy to say “Moses! He’s God! He can do it! Why do you doubt?”

Until we come up with something far smaller in our lives and doubt.

The God who acted for Moses acts for us today. Trust Him. His power is infinite.

We shall continue tomorrow.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Deeper Waters, a blog that seeks to take its readers into a dive in the ocean of truth! We’ve been going through the doctrine of God in Christian thought with our guide being the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, which can be read for free at newadvent.org. Last night, we finished looking at the topic of the Book of Life so tonight, we will begin an all new topic, the power of God! Let our first question then be the one we should be asking first, does God even have power?

Aquinas makes a distinction between passive power and active power to explain how there is power in God, which he of course says there is. Passive power is the ability to be acted upon. My computer keyboard has passive power. I am the one with the active power capable of acting on it. Of course, once it’s acted on, somehow, it has active power that sends the signals out that cause these letters to show up. I also have passive power. I can be acted upon.

God’s power is only active. God cannot be acted upon in the sense that we change God. For instance, while we are told to pray, we are not told to pray to change God. We are to pray mainly to align ourselves to God and realize that everything that we have comes from Him and we are to be dependent on Him for all that we have.

Another point to be brought up is once again the simplicity of God. In other beings, there is the will to act and then the power to bring about that will and these are separate things. In God, the will and the power are the same but they only differ in idea. It is a hard point again to understand, but it is a foundation of the doctrine of Aquinas and the first attribute of God he discusses after establishing God’s existence.

There is also the question of matter. Why? Matter is a force that is passive. It acts according to set laws. Aristotle said that better than every power is its act. Form is also better than matter. That is, what a thing is by essence rather than by matter. Action is also better than active power. Therefore, if God is power, then it would seem that God could be better. Since he cannot be, he surely cannot be power and thus cannot have power.

This is the case only where there is a distinction. In God however, there is no distinction. His active power is how he brings about his will. He is able to do that which he wills to do. God is the most powerful of all not only in quantity, which is infinite as we shall see later, but quality, as he is capable of acting on all other things in whatever way he desires.

Thus, we conclude that there is power in God and we should all realize that. God has the ability to bring about change, but too often, we look at our world as if He could not. Let us forsake such a view for such a view is of a god who does not exist, an idol.

We shall continue tomorrow.

Hello readers, and welcome back to Deeper Waters, the blog where we dive into the ocean of truth! At the moment, we are studying the Christian doctrine of God. We’ve had as our guide the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, a work readable for free at newadvent.org. Tonight, we’re going to wrap up our look at the Book of Life in the work of Aquinas and ask the question “Can Anyone Be Blotted Out Of The Book Of Life?”

I suspect that many readers were asking this question somewhere in predestination or in this topic. The question of salvation being something that one can lose or not is a divisive topic sadly in Christian circles. Once again, while I do have an opinion on this, I am at first simply trying to get across the views of Aquinas, as I try to not take a firm stance on secondary doctrine in this blog.

Has it not been said earlier that predestination is based on foreknowledge? If it is then based on the foreknowledge of God, and predestination is the same as the Book of Life but only differ in idea, then it would seem that since the foreknowledge of God cannot change and is eternal and immutable, then no one can be blotted out of the Book.

However, Aquinas does believe that it is possible for someone to be blotted out of the Book of Life. There are passages of Scripture that are cited that give this impression. Revelation 3:5 and Psalm 68:29 are two such examples. Moses also when he interceded for Israel said that he would prefer that if Israel could not be redeemed that God would just blot him out of the Book of Life.

Yet how can Aquinas hold this position if he believes that the foreknowledge of God cannot change? To begin with, let us remember that Aquinas definitely does believe the foreknowledge of God cannot change. The question then to ask is what is it that God has foreknowledge of?

God has foreknowledge of things that can change and there are two ways one can be in the Book of Life. One is by predestination and if that is the case, then that will not change. The other is by having some form of grace by which one could be made worthy, but losing that grace. We must remember that Aquinas spoke in the previous article of being in the book relatively.

What God has foreknowledge of does not change insofar as it is the knowledge of God. God does have knowledge however of things that are changing. For instance, God knows right now I am sitting at my computer. However, he also knows I plan on sleeping tonight and that will not be sitting at my computer. (At least I hope not!) God knows right now infallibly that I am doing what I’m doing, but he also knows in the same way what I will be doing in the future. (And while I have plans, I will not be so presumptuous to say they won’t go perfectly as is presented in James 4)

Thus, God knows unchangeably what will happen to changing things. The change does not lie in God but in the object. In this way, Aquinas can speak of God having eternal knowledge of who will have eternal life, but also having some names being blotted out of the Book of Life. It’s not as if God is taken by surprise.

For our purposes, rather I agree or disagree, my advice to Christians who struggle with salvation is this. First off, I have not met anyone before that I have met wrestling with salvation who I have not believed is saved. Second, if you are worried that you are going to lose salvation based on not doing enough or because you made a mistake at one point, I would say I do not agree with that. Your salvation is not so flimsy that it is easily lost.

Most importantly however, simply live your life in trust of God. Live as if you were saved if you are doubtful. Live a life of praise and trust to Him and trust that he will guide you.

On a more therapeutic approach, I recommend the web site of Gary Habermas and having listeners go to his audio material on doubt, pain, and existential suffering. I cannot recommend enough the material on conquering emotional doubt. This can be found at www.garyhabermas.com.

We shall begin a new topic tomorrow.